WCU earns grant to train family nurses

Western Carolina University’s School of Nursing is the recipient of nearly $700,000 in federal grant funding to help address a shortage of primary health care providers in Western North Carolina.

The Health Resources and Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is awarding WCU $349,877 annually during a two-year period to increase student enrollment in it’s specialized master’s degree program for family nurse practitioners.

The funding will be used to support second- and third-year graduate students in the university’s program by providing up to $11,000 annually to each student to help defray the cost of education, including assistance with the cost of tuition, fees, books and living expenses.

This Must Be the Place

Standing in line at the Old Europe coffee shop in downtown Asheville, I said that to my old friend, Jerica. It was a rainy Sunday evening and we’d just gotten out of a documentary screening (about Tim Leary and Ram Dass) at the Grail Moviehouse. While I was mulling over the cosmic nature and theme of the film and what our place is in the universe (as per usual), I looked over at Jerica and smiled.

Reading Room

Of course, we’re intended to read from cover to cover many books — novels, histories, biographies, and more. It would make little sense to begin Mark Helprin’s novel A Soldier of the Great War on page 340 of its 860 pages. We might open and commence reading Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat, on page 241, but we’d miss some of the…